Ice Cream, Nice Asses, and Anna Karenina
by BatmansBabe
Summary: Just a little snippet. What happened before the crash in Teach Me Tonight. Implied Lit. Rating for language


AN: I wrote this the first time I watched Teach Me Tonight, a little OS about what could have been said while they got ice cream, and I've been revising it and re reading it and wondering whether or not to post it. After a long deliberation, I decided I needed to be criticized a bit, so here it is. Hope you enjoy it.

Ice Cream, Nice Asses, and Anna Karenina 

Anna watched the pair walk in, realizing it was the first pair of people she hadn't recognized all night. They were standing close, not touching, but standing closer than she usually saw friends standing, and they were smiling about something. "I'm telling you, Ernest is a genius."

"Ernest is depressing."

"He is not! I'm telling you, you've got to look at him from a different perspective. Pretend you read him before Jane Austen infected your mind, pretend you didn't agree with Paris about the Beats, and then, tell me how you like Ernest."

"I'm already corrupted. It would be impossible to un-corrupt me."

He smiled, and Anna noticed the tenderness in his eyes. When he looked up at her, the tenderness was gone. "Two vanilla ice creams."

"Jess, I can get my own---."

"This is so that you'll read Hemingway."

"Oh, so you think that by bribing me, I'll read Hemingway?"

"Is it working?"

"Are you going to study afterwards?"

Anna interrupted, "Cones or cups?"

"Cones."

The girl giggled, elongating the word. "Coooones."

"What size?"

The boy looked at the sizes, then shrugged, glancing at the girl. "Mediums, please."

"Both of them?"

The boy just stared at her for a moment.

"Yes."

Anna watched the girl give him a shove, and turned away, towards the counter to make their order. "Again, I'm going to open up the floor with a question about your talking skills. You remember the whole 2 or more syllables thing?"

"She's not your mom or Luke."

"You do the whole verbal thing pretty well, when you like people. What about Paris? You got along just fine with her."

"I told you, the verbal thing comes and goes."

Anna turned back around, punching in buttons on the register, reciting the total. The boy took out his wallet, passed his bills over to her wordlessly, and waited while she counted change.

"Okay, now I have to go to the bathroom."

"Huh."

The girl scowled at him. "Excuse me," she glanced down at Anna's nametag, "Anna, where are the restrooms?"

She pointed, "Right through there. Take a left at the end of the hallway."

The girl smiled, waved her thanks, and turned away from the counter. The boy's eyes followed her until she was gone from sight, and Anna wondered, not for the first time, what the two's relationship was. She handed him his money, tried to resist the strong urge to pry, and failed miserably. "Girlfriend?"

He stared at her for a moment. "No."

"Sister, cousin, best friend…any relation at all?"

"Nope."

"Oh, so you just met her on the way in."

He avoided her question altogether, pointing at her nametag. "Tolstoy?"

"Sorry?"

"Anna Karenina. Tolstoy wrote it."

"Oh. I didn't know."

He raised eyebrows, and she turned again, wondering at him. He was goodlooking, no doubt about it, with a bit of a New York kiss-my-ass look about him. His hair was a memorial to James Dean, spiked to the max with no hope of a rest flat on his head, and he had an angular jaw, haunting brown eyes, a slightly crooked mouth that showed when he smirked, or smiled, Anna imagined. There was a book in his back pocket, something obscure she knew she'd never heard of, in passing or otherwise, and the jeans he wore slung low on his hips, enticingly low. His jacket covered the tops of them, though and Anna smiled, knowing he was long gone, totally all out in love with this girl. Or, at the very least, enamored to the point of no return.

She turned in time to see the girl come back, looking around the small shop selfconciously, as if afraid someone was staring.

"Hey," she said as she reached them, and leaned around to stare at his backside. "You said you were finished reading Please Kill Me."

"I am."

"Writing notes in the margins?"

"You were so just checking me out."

"Excuse me?"

"You just stared at my ass."

"I have a boyfriend. And I was looking at the book."

"Ha. Dean the machine. And the book was in the back pocket of my pants. Hence the accusation of you staring at my ass."

"I was not." Her face was red, and she had a scandalized look in her eyes, eyes that were blinking constantly.

"You are. And that was a lie, there. I'm re-thinking giving you this ice cream cone."

She sighed. "It was the blinky thing, wasn't it?"

"The blinky thing?"

"My mom says when I lie I do this…you know, never mind. I wasn't checking out your ass, and the blinky thing is nothing. We've got your cones, now we can go home and study."

He grinned as Anna handed the ice cream over to them. "Why are we studying again?"

"Jess!"

"Rory!"

"Did you not just promise me that if we took this drive you would go right back to Luke's and study?"

"Did I say that?"

"Jess! Yes , you said that. You said exactly that."

"Technically, I did study."

"Oh?"

"You read me Othello."

"For five minutes before the criticizing began."

"I was kidding. I promised I'd study, I'll keep my promise."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Thank god for ice cream cones."

The girl turned to smile at Anna as they made their way back out the door, toward the baby blue car she'd sent hem get out of. "Thank you!" she called out, waving softly at Anna before the door swung shut.

She watched the pair walk away, always touching…shoulders, elbows, or fingers brushing by, an almost imperceptible lean to one or the others posture, and knew that they had no idea they were doing anything at all. The girl struck up the conversation again, gesticulating wildly and waving her ice cream cone in the air, to which she was reprimanded. She got the words "go back for more," and "no studying done at all," the girl pouted, and he frowned, motioning for her to go on. She did, grinning as he held the door open for her, shut it as she scooted into the seat, and made his way around to the other side. He pulled out and the car pulled off the curb. She watched it until it disappeared in the distance.

AN 2: I've realized I tend to use 2nd person perspective quite a bit in my writing, and I wonder if that means something. Am I secretly a voyeur? Ha.


End file.
